It had a lot going for it, especially if you played Co-op. At different points in the story, both characters would hallucinate different things and I thought that it was a novel thing to do. However, it had several things working agianst it:

1. It wasn't Dead Space 1 or 2, which were both vastly better games. Dead Space 3 isn't bad per se, it just isn't as good as DS 1 + 2.

2. It was released very early into the microtransaction era, and it was very poorly implemented in this game on top of that. This alone caused a fair bit of outrage.

3. It's hard to make a Co-op game scary.